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01.06.12
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy, General at 1:24 pm by nemo
Mirowski’s Against Mechanism is an older book on this expose of neo-classical economics, now priced out of the market at Amazon (??). Should be reissued, and also check out Kuttner’s Everything For Sale. Mirowski has a lot of more recent books that are also good reading, e.g. More Heat Than Light.
Keen’s Debunking Economics takes the critique to a whole new level.
I hope Mirowski’s earlier book will be reissued.
Here’s a good Amazon review:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R3S454X3XKDUA8/ref=cm_cr_dp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0847674363&nodeID=283155&tag=&linkCode=
The public has a need to know, to say the least, re: the muddle of neo-classical economics. The recession has obviously been prolonged by the stupidity of economists, to the great suffering of millions.
Permalink
12.17.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 12:55 pm by nemo
Ayn Rand’s life is a lesson in the liabilities for intelligent people, who can be themselves seduced into technocratic illusion where the gateway is, well, intelligence. This type is in the phase of apotheosis in the age of hedge funds: a realm of Kantian intelligent devils, hopefully now burning out. We see a remarkable case in Alan Greenspan, both the smart/stupid economic theory geek/idiot, and direct follower of Ayn Rand. Greenspan is a warning that if math genius can be so vulnerable, what of the rest of Joe Public?
The same syndrome is, of course, present in evolutionary biology (aka Darwinism?) where, however, the level of intelligence is so low in general that the effect is less visible, but thrives especially in economics, where ‘smart’ stupidity seems to be the ruling paradigm.
The mystique of mathematical economics seems to be a game preserve for this type, and to claim those smart enough to handle the math, but, apparently, not smart enough to see the trap in the whole game. Mirowski’s More Heat Than Light (google/Amazon the title), cited here several times, shows one aspect of the game: the feeling you are doing something on the level of physics, when, in fact, you are indulging in pastiche.
In a way Marx as the ‘smart’ antagonist was the foil for this game of the smart/stupids, and almost succumbed himself, as he obsessed over economic theory.
Here Ayn Rand seems to be caught in this silly game, in a variant of the smart/stupid cubed, the Nietzschen superman type in the Rand disguise in her novels, in the age of superman comics. She had the same knack we see in Nietzsche of creating devoted converts in the ranks of those with IQ anxiety confronting the super smart. And this being is the typical smart/stupid of this type, hot and bothered over the selfishness quotient in bad economic Smithianism.
A pathetical case, and the remarkable achievement of a new level of stupidity.
How Ayn Rand Seduced Generations of Young Men and Helped Make the U.S. Into a Selfish, Greedy NationThanks in part to Rand, the United States is one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world.
December 15, 2011 |
Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society….To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.— Gore Vidal, 1961
Only rarely in U.S. history do writers transform us to become a more caring or less caring nation. In the 1850s, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was a strong force in making the United States a more humane nation, one that would abolish slavery of African Americans. A century later, Ayn Rand (1905-1982) helped make the United States into one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world, a neo-Dickensian society where healthcare is only for those who can afford it, and where young people are coerced into huge student-loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.
Permalink
09.23.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 12:27 pm by nemo
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14972015
22 September 2011 Last updated at 19:06 ET
Has Western capitalism failed?
Twenty years ago, the fall of communism in Eastern Europe seemed to prove the triumph of capitalism. But was that an illusion? Constant shocks to the world’s financial system over the past few years prompted the BBC World Service’s Business Daily programme to ask leading figures whether they thought Western capitalism had failed.
by Angel Gurria: Secretary General, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
My answer to this question would be no. But I also wonder whether capitalism should be answering to the prosecution.
We failed as regulators, we failed as supervisors, we failed as corporate governance managers, we failed as risk managers, and we also failed in the allocation of roles and responsibilities for international economic organisations.
Some international organisations saw the crisis coming. Some even managed to put out some warnings, but they did not co-ordinate their assessments, they did not speak with one strong voice.
Thus, they were ignored in an atmosphere of great prosperity where everybody was making a lot of money and everybody thought that innovation was the name of the game – and by warning that something could go wrong, you would look like you were holding progress back.
There was also the philosophy that markets needed to function with the least possible government intervention. But that did not mean that they could work without any intervention at all, nor did it necessarily mean that the intervention could be such a light touch that you were not able to identify risks.
So the crisis left a dire legacy. A legacy of high unemployment, enormous fiscal deficits which we are still struggling to control, and an accumulated public debt which has already reached 100% of GDP on average in the OECD countries.
It is very important to send clear signals of how we are going to address this debt problem without sacrificing growth and employment.
Reforms to product and labour markets, education, innovation, green growth, competition, taxes, health – they are the things that should be the object of our primary focus in the context of a long-term strategy to restore sustained growth.
This will create jobs and help to tackle debt.
We also need to “go social” and focus on innovative policies to protect the most vulnerable.
Ken Ofori Atta: Executive chairman and co-founder of Databank Financial Services (Ghana)
The 20 years prior to the recent credit crisis could be described as capitalism as its best, with global wealth accelerating at ever increasing rates.
Since 1990, when we left Wall Street and founded Databank to offer the first investment banking services in Ghana, we were able to capitalise significantly on the boom years,
We have also observed and embraced how some of that capitalism-fuelled wealth has found its way into funding education, innovation and creativity, all in pursuit of a better life and hopefully a better world.
All too recently this notion was challenged. The spark that ignited the crisis led to a conflagration of adverse effects. These spread like a virus across North America, Europe and right down into Asia.
While our counterparts dealing on the historically more developed markets were taking increasing amounts of risk, employing complicated financial instruments to make returns from increasingly complex derivatives, Ghana – and Africa as a whole – was focused largely on helping to fund a growth in enterprise.
We were not so widely exposed to toxic assets so we weathered the storm well. And we did so employing the techniques the Databank founders learnt on Wall Street: Western capitalism in its truest form.
From this Ghanaian’s perspective, no talk of capitalism could be made without mentioning Dr JB Danquah, the father of this philosophy in the then Gold Coast. Danquah’s vision was to create an environment in which individuals would be able to set up and run enterprises that would in turn create wealth for themselves and their households.
Citizens would therefore be in the position to acquire and own properties that could be used as collateral for credit to enhance their businesses and expand wealth to benefit more families.
This thesis not only allows many people to create wealth, but stimulates initiatives, making people more independent for their own good and also for the good of the nation.
What went awry among the frenzy for growth in more mature markets was people losing sight of the fact that someone somewhere has to work hard to make a market and build a business to create real enduring value that goes beyond the bottom line.
Chandran Nair: Founder of Hong-Kong based think tank Global Institute For Tomorrow (GIFT)
The extreme form of capitalism which has permeated the world, particularly in the last 30-40 years, is in deep trouble and we are in denial.
It is important to understand that fundamental principles of capitalism – that human beings are rational and markets behave rationally, and that markets will assign prices – are flawed.
It is also important to understand the roots of modern capitalism.
You could argue that slavery was the first attempt to under-price resources. When slavery came to an end there was colonisation, which was again an attempt by the capitalist model to use resources cheaply. With the end of colonies, we had the globalisation argument of economic growth and then the globalisation of finance.
When I speak about this in Europe, they say there has been 30 years of over-leverage, but I say they should multiply that by 10 and look at 300 years of essentially exploited growth.
What we need to recognise now is that the world is a very different place from what it was 100 years ago when we had one billion people.
With a current population approaching seven billion, things will have to change.
A fundamental issue that the world will have to recognise, and which Western capitalism has conveniently ignored, is that the goods and services which companies and economies seem to thrive on are based on under-pricing resources and externalising costs.
That game is over and we need a fundamental restructuring – essentially about how people will live, and we need to move beyond simple notions about growth to more sophisticated, nuanced discussions about human progress.
That is not the same as suggesting that economic growth will be able to deliver i-toys and cars to everyone. This is not possible and that is where capitalism has essentially hit a wall and a very different conversation needs to take place.
Professor Tim Jackson: Author of Prosperity without Growth – economics for a finite planet
Every society clings to a myth by which it lives.
Ours is the myth of economic growth. For the last five decades, the pursuit of growth has been the single most important policy goal across the world. The global economy is five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate it will be 80 times that size by the year 2100.
This extraordinary ramping up of global economic activity is without historical precedent. It is totally at odds with the finite resource base and the fragile ecology on which we depend for survival.
Most of the time, we avoid the stark reality of these numbers. Growth must go on, we insist.
The reasons for this collective blindness are easy enough to find.
Western capitalism is structurally reliant on growth for its stability. When growth falters – as it has done recently – politicians panic. Businesses struggle to survive. People lose their jobs and sometimes their homes.
Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries.
Yet question it we must. The myth of growth has failed us. It has failed the two billion people who still live on less than $2 a day. It has failed the fragile ecological systems on which we depend for survival.
But economic crisis presents us with a unique opportunity to invest in change. To sweep away the short-term thinking that has plagued society for decades. To engage, for instance, in a radical overhaul of dysfunctional capital markets.
Untrammelled speculation in commodities and financial derivatives brought the financial world to the brink of collapse just three years ago. It needs to be replaced by a longer, slower sense of capital.
Fixing the economy is only part of the battle. We also have to confront the convoluted logic of consumerism. The days of spending money we do not have on things we do not need to impress people we do not care about are over.
Living well is about good nutrition, decent homes, access to good quality services, stable communities, satisfying employment.
Prosperity, in any meaningful sense of the word, transcends material concerns. It resides in our love for our families, the support of our friends, the strength of our communities, our ability to participate fully in the life of society, a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives.
Russian capitalism is somewhat old and in need of urgent repair, but the spirit of capitalism – risk-taking, saving, investing, hard work – all those virtues have now migrated and are happily ensconced in China, India, Indonesia, Korea and Japan – the countries which we never thought would ever get out of poverty.
Western capitalism probably had half a century of over-indulgence – continued prosperity, full employment, almost guaranteed growth – and that in its turn meant that our costs went up and manufacturing industry migrated abroad, while finance has proved to be a fickle friend.
We will have to rethink our model, our values, we will have to acquire old-fashioned virtues, because capitalism is not going to go any time fast.
If Asia has vigorous energetic capitalism and we have tired old capitalism, we will end up paying a huge price and we will trade our prosperity for their prosperity.
Socialism died 20 years ago – capitalism lives on.
It changes its form, it migrates, it is fully global. Now we at last understand what globalisation means – it means we are just as important as anyone else. If we don’t work very hard, we will lose our importance.
That is the lesson of the contemporary world.
Capitalism lives through crisis. That is how it renews and invigorates itself.
For our bad luck, capitalism has renewed itself by migrating eastwards. We are left with the debris and we have to do something to get ourselves out this crisis but that will have to be in the spirit of capitalism, not against it.
Permalink
09.04.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 10:54 am by nemo
Gaddafi, Assange and China
Neoliberalism and Its Discontents
by PETER LEE
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/02/neoliberalism-and-its-discontents/
One might think that in this brave new world of escalating global economic and social problems and burgeoning BRICs, priority might be given to forging consensus with the new rising powers to get the planet out of its economic rut and building a future less reliant on ruinous competition for resources and security
Permalink
08.29.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 10:23 am by nemo
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-29/give-marx-a-chance-to-save-the-world-economy-commentary-by-george-magnus.html
Permalink
08.20.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 12:49 pm by nemo
Just got a copy of this: A Companion to Marx’s Capital [Paperback]
David Harvey
A possible waste of money at this point: Harvey lards his useful-for-browsing-and-paper-airplanes book with the reverent Marx dogmatism about a great genius that is misplaced, and counterproductive to serious thought.
Who cares about Capital at this point? It is a failed book that Marx couldn’t complete, but which serves handily as a revolutionary poster, and generalized protest against capitalism. But the focus on its detail backfires and subjects the left to refutations by the dozen, wholesale. Endless critical works that marxist retards are apparently unable to read. This formulation is no longer viable. The narrow focus of marxists is fatal here. Most are unaware that decisive critiques were already coming in the 1890′s. The faithful just don’t get it. And the solution is not hard: reconstruct the basic argument. And stop wasting time on idiocy, like defending the labor theory of value, etc…
Marx set the left up for endless critical attacks with his dubious theories, none of which are needed for real ‘praxis’.
Marx’s text ground to a halt, probably because Marx sensed his theory of history was wrong. As an analysis of history and economics it is a package of flawed theories. So what? Used as a generalized encomnium to action and renewed study it works fine.
That they are flawed should be incidental at this point, if the left had proceeded to a creative renewal of its basic principles. Instead we have to go over the Marx canon with heads bowed, in hushed whispers, as the sorry ghosts of Marx/Engels are subjected to analytical table-rapping. A decent socialist model is not that hard, why has it been made impossible? If the first such model is flawed, work on another. We need a blueprint of how to run an economy under conditions of democratic rights in a situation bordering on ecological collapse, and the need to constrict markets, or even abolish them. A tough assignment, one that Marx avoided like a plague, fearful he would bungle the job. It was all fancy footwork, and putting off the defining tenets of something real.
He did bungle the job. So what? We move on and get ready for the revolution against the revolution underway from the right: the creation of a new postcapitalist serfdom and malthusian/darwinian mass murder of whole populations.
Make Marx into a wall poster, and get with it on the continuation. Marx and Spartacus are both inspirational, but archaeological digs, at this point.
Permalink
08.13.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 11:26 am by nemo
Marx was right; capitalism can destroy itself: Roubini
Nouriel Roubini cited an even more controversial economist than himself this week when explaining the state of the world’s turbulent economy.
“Karl Marx got it right, at some point capitalism can destroy itself,” said Mr. Roubini, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “We thought markets worked. They’re not working.”
Mr. Roubini also said there is more than a 50% chance the world will plunge into another global recession and the next two to three months will reveal the economy’s direction.
“We are at stall speed right now, and we do not know if we are going to go up, or down,” he said.
Known as Dr. Doom for his prediction of the 2008 financial crisis among other dire forecasts, the economist said more monetary policy is needed from central banks to avoid another meltdown.
“There could be QE3, QE4, QE5 in the long-haul,” in the United States, he said.
But monetary policy alone will not be enough, and business and governments are not helping.
Developed economies such as the United States and countries in the eurozone are implementing austerity programs to try to fix their debt-ridden economies, when they should be introducing more monetary stimulus, he said.
And by slashing labour costs and sitting on capital, U.S. businesses have created a “catch-22.”
“Because you cannot keep shifting income from labour to capital without not having excess capacity and lack of aggregate demand. And that’s what’s happening,” the economist said.
In the wide-ranging interview, Mr. Roubini said it is possible that Italy or Spain could choose to leave the eurozone within five years. He also didn’t disagree with the premise of Standard & Poor’s controversial downgrade that the United States was on a unsustainable fiscal path, made worse by Washington’s gridlock.
Roubini says he’s putting his money in cash, with U.S. Treasurys a smart bet. “Now is not the time for risky assets,” he said.
With files from Dow Jones
Permalink
07.27.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 10:29 am by nemo
http://www.vxec.com/2011/07/jeffrey-sachs-budgetary-deceit-and-americas-decline/
Excerpt:
Who runs America today? The rich and the multinational corporations. Who
runs the White House? David Plouffe, whose job it is to make sure that ever
word, every action of the president is calculated for electoral gain rather
than the country’s needs. Who runs the Congress, on both sides of the aisle?
The lobbyists, who win in every negotiation. And who loses? The American
people, who have said repeatedly that they want a budget that sharply cuts
the military, ends the wars, raises taxes on the rich, protects the poor and
the middle class, and invests in America’s future not just in Obama’s
speeches but in fact.
America needs a third-party movement to break the hammerlock of the
financial elites. Until that happens, the political class and the media
conglomerates will continue to spew lies, American militarism will continue
to destabilize a growing swath of the world, and the country will continue
its economic decline.
Permalink
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 12:05 pm by nemo
Published on Tuesday, July 19, 2011 by YES! Magazine
How is it that our nation is awash in money, but too broke to provide jobs and services?
by David Korten
The dominant story of the current political debate is that the government is broke. We can’t afford to pay for public services, put people to work, or service the public debt. Yet as a nation, we are awash in money. A defective system of money, banking, and finance just puts it in the wrong places.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/19-8
Permalink
07.10.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 12:29 pm by nemo
http://www.redfortyeight.com/2011/07/10/evils-of-unregulated-capitalism/
Just a few years ago, a powerful ideology – the belief in free and unfettered markets – brought the world to the brink of ruin. Even in its hey-day, from the early 1980s until 2007, US-style deregulated capitalism brought greater material well-being only to the very richest in the richest country of the world.
Indeed, over the course of this ideology’s 30-year ascendance, most Americans saw their incomes decline or stagnate year after year
.
Permalink
06.22.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 11:21 am by nemo
NY Times Op-Ed June 21, 2011
Wal-Mart’s Authoritarian Culture
By NELSON LICHTENSTEIN
Santa Barbara, Calif.
MONDAY’S Supreme Court decision to block a class-action sex-discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart was a huge setback for as many as 1.6 million current and former female employees of the world’s largest retailer. But the decision has consequences that range far beyond sex discrimination or the viability of class-action suits.
The underlying issue, which the Supreme Court has now ratified, is Wal-Mart’s authoritarian style, by which executives pressure store-level management to squeeze more and more from millions of clerks, stockers and lower-tier managers.
Indeed, the sex discrimination at Wal-Mart that drove the recent suit is the product not merely of managerial bias and prejudice, but also of a corporate culture and business model that sustains it, rooted in the company’s very beginnings.
In the 1950s and ’60s, northwest Arkansas, where Wal-Mart got its start, was poor, white and rural, in the midst of a wave of agricultural mechanization that generated a huge surplus of unskilled workers. To these men and women, the burgeoning chain of discount stores founded by Sam Walton was a godsend. The men might find dignity managing a store instead of a hardscrabble farm, while their wives and daughters could earn pin money clerking for Mr. Sam, as he was known. “The enthusiasm of Wal-Mart associates toward their jobs is one of the company’s greatest assets,” declared the firm’s 1973 annual report.
A patriarchal ethos was written into the Wal-Mart DNA. “Welcome Assistant Managers and Wives” read a banner at a 1975 meeting for executive trainees. And that corporate culture — “the single most important element in the continued, remarkable success of Wal-Mart,” asserted Don Soderquist, the company’s chief operating officer in the 1990s — was sustained not only by the hypercentralized managerial control that flowed from the Bentonville, Ark., home office but by the evangelical Protestantism that Mr. Soderquist and other executives encouraged.
Wal-Mart attorneys have argued, and the Supreme Court agreed this week, that even if sex discrimination was once part of the company’s culture, it is now ancient history: if any store managers are guilty of bias when it comes to promoting women, they are at odds with corporate policy. Wal-Mart is no longer an Ozark company; it is a cosmopolitan, multinational operation.
But that avoids the more essential point, namely that Wal-Mart views low labor costs and a high degree of workplace flexibility as a signal competitive advantage. It is a militantly anti-union company that has been forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to current and former employees for violations of state wage and hour laws.
In other words, the patriarchy of old has been reconfigured into a more systematically authoritarian structure, one that deploys a communitarian ethos to sustain a high degree of corporate loyalty even as wages and working conditions are put under continual downward pressure — especially in recent years, as Wal-Mart’s same-store sales have declined. Workers of both sexes pay the price, but women, who constitute more than 70 percent of hourly employees, pay more.
There are tens of thousands of experienced Wal-Mart women who would like to be promoted to the first managerial rung, salaried assistant store manager. But Wal-Mart makes it impossible for many of them to take that post, because its ruthless management style structures the job itself as one that most women, and especially those with young children or a relative to care for, would find difficult to accept.
Why? Because, for all the change that has swept over the company, at the store level there is still a fair amount of the old communal sociability. Recognizing that workers steeped in that culture make poor candidates for assistant managers, who are the front lines in enforcing labor discipline, Wal-Mart insists that almost all workers promoted to the managerial ranks move to a new store, often hundreds of miles away.
For young men in a hurry, that’s an inconvenience; for middle-aged women caring for families, this corporate reassignment policy amounts to sex discrimination. True, Wal-Mart is hardly alone in demanding that rising managers sacrifice family life, but few companies make relocation such a fixed policy, and few have employment rolls even a third the size.
The obstacles to women’s advancement do not stop there. The workweek for salaried managers is around 50 hours or more, which can surge to 80 or 90 hours a week during holiday seasons. Not unexpectedly, some managers think women with family responsibilities would balk at such demands, and it is hardly to the discredit of thousands of Wal-Mart women that they may be right.
There used to be a remedy for this sort of managerial authoritarianism: it was called a union, which bargained over not only wages and pensions but also the kind of qualitative issues, including promotion and transfer policies, that have proved so vexing for non-unionized employees at Wal-Mart and other big retailers.
For a time it seemed as if the class-action lawsuit might be a partial substitute. By drastically limiting how a class-action suit can be brought, the Supreme Court leaves millions of service-sector workers with few avenues to escape the grinding work life and limited opportunities that so many now face.
Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of “The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business.”
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06.13.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy, you've got mail at 12:50 pm by nemo
Published on Monday, June 13, 2011 by GRITtv
The (Non-Weiner) News That Matters: Jared Bernstein
Looking to date the downfall of American society, future historians may point to the last two weeks as the pivotal moment along the way. Among the signposts: Nobel winning labor economist Peter Diamond withdrawing his name for a governorship at the Federal Reserve; unemployment jagging up, house prices plummeting down. So says former White House economist Jared Bernstein. (It’ll require future historians because live-time American pols and pundits were absorbed with Rep. Weiner’s you know what.)
Like Diamond, Bernstein wanted to make a difference from inside — but he left the administration this April in order to work more effectively on the nation’s priorities. We spoke June 7th at his new perch, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.. The full interview will be seen on The Laura Flanders Show, coming this fall, to public television stations nationwide.
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/06/13
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06.09.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy, Evolution at 11:38 am by nemo
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/06/a-mismeasured-mismeasurement-of-man/
Razib Khan is a sad case of the Darwinian fundamentalist/fanatic (someone from Moslem background who suses Darwin fanaticism to proof his ‘secularism’) who gets rewarded for it by the Darwin establishment: blogger at Discovery. Since, without training, I can track down the flaws in population models, I am not impressed. His take on Gould is predictable. But he usefully cites the views of Krugman, whose opinionated prejudice against Gould is sad, and revealing. I read Krugman twice at week on the economy and respect his views, so a little disrepect is OK, I guess. Now we know that Krugman is a sucker for mathematical models in economics. (serious joke, but read Kuttner on econo-math models). That’s the problem with being super smart. I have studied the realm of mathematical economics (not very thoroughly) and can see the way sucess in understanding this field mathematically induces delusion about what economics really is. Abstract models based on higher calculus are not properly founded in reality. Whatever. I think Krugman has learned this somewhere and has reveerted to real intelligence, visible in his Times commentary.
But his views on Darwinism are an interesting indication of the way the hyper-smart can’t get disentangled from the swan song of selectionist oversimplifications. This strange situation is crippling advance from Darwinism, when it gets the endorsement of the super-smart idiots spawned by our eductional non-system.
I think he has missed the point with Gould (who I also find frustrating) who took Eldredge’s brilliant insight and muffled it, turning it into an adjunct of Darwinian theory. What should have been on the table with ‘punctuated equilibrium’ theory was the real nature of evolutionary theories, starting with the man who first proposed the right approach (then confused it with his acquired characters theory), Larmarck.
Krugman indulges in some arrogant dismisal of the those who dislike mathematics, with what connection to Darwinism we don’t know (unless the obvious reference to the Hamiltonian strain of population genetics math, etc…), but the insinuation that preference for Gould is some kind of ‘evolution for poets’ syndrome is ridiculous. It is the obsession with reductionist methods like those in physics that has misled the whole profession and made a fetish out of the illusion of evolutionary mechanics.
In any case, I fault Gould for cowardice. His realization that the Synthesis was over was followed by seeming retraction, and a failure to halt the paradigm in its tracks. Instead we had a generation of the Dawkins cult and the triumph of the ‘smart stupidity’ that Krugman also exhibits, next to an entire generation of Darwinina true believers, like Razib Kahn.
I would say The Mismeasurement of Man is one of the most commonly cited books on this weblog over the years (in the comments). It comes close to being “proof-text” in many arguments online, because of the authority and eminence of the author in the public mind, Stephen Jay Gould. I am in general not particularly a fan of Gould’s work or thought, with many of my sentiments matching the attitudes of Paul Krugman in this 1996 essay:
….Like most American intellectuals, I first learned about this subject [evolutionary biology] from the writings of Stephen Jay Gould. But I eventually came to realize that working biologists regard Gould much the same way that economists regard Robert Reich: talented writer, too bad he never gets anything right. Serious evolutionary theorists such as John Maynard Smith or William Hamilton, like serious economists, think largely in terms of mathematical models. Indeed, the introduction to Maynard Smith’s classic tract Evolutionary Genetics flatly declares, “If you can’t stand algebra, stay away from evolutionary biology.” There is a core set of crucial ideas in his subject that, because they involve the interaction of several different factors, can only be clearly understood by someone willing to sit still for a bit of math. (Try to give a purely verbal description of the reactions among three mutually catalytic chemicals.)
But many intellectuals who can’t stand algebra are not willing to stay away from the subject. They are thus deeply attracted to a graceful writer like Gould, who frequently misrepresents the field (perhaps because he does not fully understand its essentially mathematical logic), but who wraps his misrepresentations in so many layers of impressive, if irrelevant, historical and literary erudition that they seem profound.
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05.09.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 11:06 am by nemo
Positive Money (April 29 2011)
Fifteen Things They Don’t Tell You About Money
Inspired by Ha Joon Chang’s 23 Things They Didn’t Tell You About
Capitalism (2010) (where you learn for example that the Nobel Prize for
Economics is not really a Nobel Prize: it is awarded by the Swedish
Central Bank).
Read the rest of this entry »
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05.08.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 9:40 am by nemo
Published on Saturday, May 7, 2011 by The South Florida Sun-Sentinel
“Shock Doctrine” Economics Ruining America
by Stephen L. Goldstein
WARNING: Reading Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” will disturb your sleep and haunt your waking hours. If you’re a real American, it will make you want to scream — and do something to put “the bad guys” in their place. Everyone — especially Milton-Friedman, free-market lovers like Kingsley Guy — should read “Shock.” If enough people do so, it could save the country. If they don’t, our democratic/representative government and capitalism will be permanently replaced by the un-American, corporate-socialist state that has already taken hold — and it will be our own fault.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/07-3
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04.21.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 12:27 pm by nemo
In Praise of Marx
Another piece from Eagleton on his new book on Marx. We had a critical post on that here, plus this at Amazon:
Review of Eagleton book
If you read this first paragraph of Eagleton’s essay:
Praising Karl Marx might seem as perverse as putting in a good word for the Boston Strangler. Were not Marx’s ideas responsible for despotism, mass murder, labor camps, economic catastrophe, and the loss of liberty for millions of men and women? Was not one of his devoted disciples a paranoid Georgian peasant by the name of Stalin, and another a brutal Chinese dictator who may well have had the blood of some 30 million of his people on his hands?
you can see why this defense in this form is hopeless. It is an uphill struggle to evade Stalin by mentioning him that will produce the opposite result. Why not stop trying so hard to defend Marx? Instead reinvent the the issues and politics of socialism, and put that in the context of the history of modernity, the industrial/capitalist revolution, the emergence of liberal and socialism, the dynamics of revolution from the early modern onward, and a platform to bring out social democracy and/or socialism, dialectically speaking either by electoral politics (Marx/Engel’s basic strategy, despite their revolutionary bravura) or by revolution, the latter carefully defined to not repeat Leninism.
This new politics of the left
would but Marx/Engels in their place: take the best of their critique and throw the rest out, historical materialism, Das Capital, Hegelian dialectic, etc,…
Why does Marx have a monopoly on the left? It is unfair, and counterproductive and suspicious evidence the leftist cadres are so frozen in place they can’t think and need a dogmatic canon. That’s dead.
Marx/Engels were not the main source of socialism. There were multiple strains, one of most classic being the Kantian socialism of the era of Engels and the second Internationale. This text goes into the rich beauties of this approach.
Kantian Ethics and Socialism (review)
I think that a new left should be wary of even mentioning Marx and Engels, and proceed with those two in the footnotes to a new conception, which can by default simply rewrite the old (as Marx did with his sources).
I think Hegel is counterproductive at this point.
Without being unkind, Hegel has died many deaths, once again at the hands of Slavoj Zizek whose pastiche of Hegel, Marx, Lacan, and the rest of it is proof that diarrhea is toxic for the left. Why not drop all of it. Without the crutch of Marx you have to start to think.
I should note that remarkable successes arose quickly in the social democratic strain, so hated by the far left, and this was because a creative recasting of the issues was possible.
A liability of Marx is the legacy of theory, all of them botched, the main botch being historical materialism. Theories have produced confusion and error on the left. Look at the American Revolutionaries: they had no theory, only a set of recipes for action (which turned out to be vulnerable to capitalism to come). Those recipes for action updated to a leftist socialism are all that is needed.
And a new socialism has to be liberal in some generic sense: the book cited makes that obvious. The basis of liberalism and socialism is the same. Marx’s rejection of liberal rights innovations was a fiasco, and Eagleton is simply wrong to defend Marx so blindly here. Marx’s attitude was ambivalent to say the least.
It is not a complicated question: a liberal socialism that is republican, democratic, and which defines rights of and against capitalism, and the tactics of bougeois domination, as an upgrade of the English/Frence/American Revolutions, set up not as a theory of fake science but a set of recipes for action and reestablishment is all that is needed. Instead of experts like Eagleton trying to explicate the obscure Marx all over again, why not such dump the junk, and fluish the diarrhea??
The whole scheme needs to comprehensible to men of average intelligence, bypassing experts, as was the social democratic legacy, and not get quagmired in trying to resolve Hegel, dialectic, theories of history, and/or economic models. To get past Adam Smith requires getting past Darwin, so the need for a new understanding of science might help. That new understansing has already been started with Kant, so the basic framework is clear.
Marxism is overrated, contra Eagleton. I have read over a hundred texts on Marxism, at the very least, and yet the basics of the whole subject remain unclear, and subject to deceitful histories and explications by its adherents, further muddling the issues.
A button reset is absolutely essential.
I just saw a thread at Marxmail on Engels’ Dialectics of Nature. Beyond belief. After over a century that package of junk, too second-rate to be printed in Engels’ lifetime, still exists in the limbo of Marx/Engels and their Hegelian youth, and even such rubbish is beyond the power of the left to overcome.
A button reset. The irony is that such a reset makes much of Marx comprehensible, from a distance.
By Terry Eagleton
Praising Karl Marx might seem as perverse as putting in a good word for the Boston Strangler. Were not Marx’s ideas responsible for despotism, mass murder, labor camps, economic catastrophe, and the loss of liberty for millions of men and women? Was not one of his devoted disciples a paranoid Georgian peasant by the name of Stalin, and another a brutal Chinese dictator who may well have had the blood of some 30 million of his people on his hands?
Read the rest of this entry »
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04.14.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 11:36 am by nemo
Wrecking Lives Across the Globe
First, Fire the Economists
By DEAN BAKER
http://www.counterpunch.org/baker04142011.html
Last month, the International Monetary Fund’s Independent Evaluation Office issued a remarkable report. The report quite clearly blamed the IMF for failing to recognize the factors leading up to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and to provide warning to its members so that preventive actions could be taken.
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04.11.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 1:07 pm by nemo
A quick review of Eagleton’s book on Marx. More tommorrow.
By John C. Landon “nemonemini” (New York City) – See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)
This review is from: Why Marx Was Right (Hardcover)
The current economic madhouse has led to a lot of discussion of the aptness of the thinking of Karl Marx. This is a valuable application of history to the mystifications of the current system, so well propagandized. But perhaps Eagleton takes the Marx factor too far, leaving the critique exposed to the critiques–of Marx, of which they are a multitude, and aginst which Eagleton’s eloquent defense offers little defense. I think that the over-focus on Marx as infallible is a disservice to the needs of the present where the entire set of questions raised by the French Socialists and packaged by Marx/Engels needs to be recast for another age. Marx’ Capital was a mess that its author abandoned finally after decades of writer’s block. The result is a brilliant symbolism, enough, but not much of a theory. Historical materialism is a waste time at this point. Why set up leftists beginners to the gleeful attacks of the right here?
We cannot easily exempt Marx from the calamities of the Leninist then Stalinist distortions of his thought, nor can we simply negate a century of critique of Marx (cf. Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism) with enthusiastic preaching to the converted. Marx’s basic contribution is classic and legendary, a legend. But much of it is muddled, unclear, and contradictory. We should do what Marx/Engels did to their predecessors: recast the issues in a new and more coherent form, one that disassociates from the millstone around the neck of all leftists who try to forget what the Tea Partiers et al will reminder them: that the world once took Marx completely seriously and ended up in Bolshevik world madness. The way past that requires a basic pressing of the reset button. Much of the real value of Marx will resurface at that point. But the endless effort to prove that Marx was right is pointless at this point of no return. We should recall the momentum of Marxism in the roaring tide of the left at the end of the nineteenth century. That momentum is not present now to those who chant the Marx mantra. What is needed is a simple restatement of the issues of democracy, socialism, and the more distant goes of Communism in a form that need not even reference Mars. It is an illusion to think you get a second chance after the calamity of Bolshevism. What does get a second chance is the real legacy predating Marx/Engels and a part of the common heritage of the left since the French Revolution. That somewhat confused legacy of socialism was not finally clarified by Marx/Engels. So we should learn from them and yet move on. We have run out of time, and are still twenty years after the fall of Bolshevism trying to press the Marx catechism on those who simply won’t buy it, a second time.
For a critique of historical materialism and a view of the left that can substitute consider:
World History And the Eonic Effect: Civilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution Fourth Edition
http://www.amazon.com/World-History-Eonic-Effect-Landon/dp/1450060234/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277221437&sr=1-1
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04.08.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 10:51 am by nemo
Will Iceland Vote No or Commit Financial Suicide
By MICHAEL HUDSON
http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson04082011.html
A landmark fight is occurring this Saturday, April 9. Icelanders will vote on whether to subject their economy to decades of poverty, bankruptcy and emigration of their work force. At least, that is the program supported by the existing Social Democratic-Green coalition government in urging a “Yes” vote on the Icesave bailout. Their financial surrender policy endorses the European Central Bank’s lobbying for the neoliberal deregulation that led to the real estate bubble and debt leveraging, as if it were a success story rather than the road to national debt peonage. The reality was an enormous banking fraud, an orgy of insider dealing as bank managers lent the money to themselves, leaving an empty shell – and then saying that this was all how “free markets” operate. Running into debt was commended as the way to get rich. But the price to Iceland was for housing prices to plunge 70 per cent (in a country where mortgage debtors are personally liable for their negative equity), a falling GDP, rising unemployment, defaults and foreclosures.
To put Saturday’s vote in perspective, it is helpful to see what has occurred in the past year along remarkably similar lines throughout Europe. For starters, the year has seen a new acronym: PIIGS, for Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain.
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04.01.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 12:54 pm by nemo
The question of markets doesn’t require much analysis: if we look at the destruction of the Amazon forest, we can see that the unlimited working of markets is a potential catastrophe. Therefore, as this extreme example makes clear, we MUST move to oppose the full or unlimited application of markets. No big theory is required for that. We must free ourselves, as Marx warned, from the mesmerizing idea that market laws are laws of nature. The laws of nature show us how ecologies really work. The junk food scientism of bad economic ideologies dressed up as science is fatally misleading.
Iin general, the ideology of mathematical economics has destroyed thought as all the best intelligence gets caught in in the fine points of advanced calculus and mathematical analysis thinking they are doing economic science as if it were physics. But the whole load of horseshit is, as Marx first supected with Ricardo, highly dubious reasoning. The real piece de resistance here is the marginal revolution which tried to displace the older brand of Smithian analysis, and created the comedy routines of calculus applied to hot air to confuse everyone, economists most of all.
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Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 12:36 pm by nemo
Just got a copy of: Why Marx Was Right Terry Eagleton
I haven’t read this yet but I am already worried. Trying to defend Marx is not hard, but always backfires when undertaken by Marxists, it seems. The issues of political tyranny, economic interpretations of history, historical determinism, etc…, won’t go away, and the effort by a believer to restore Marxism beyond them never succeeds. It has been tried hundreds of times, but the confusion remains, because the confusion started with Marx himself whose theories are all flawed. Marx’s package was brilliant for its time, but it was a package, and never a science. It didn’t need to be science. It needed to be a critique of economic systems, not a scientific treatise, and a set of recipes for action. The theory issue has confused the left, and really confused the capitalists, who are so hooked on Adam Smith, and Darwinism, that they are beyond redemption. The confusion is hopelessly compounded by the mathematical claptrap that surrounds the whole mystification.
Instead of just pointing to this, Marxists have wasted everyone’s time proposing their own crackpot theories. The amount of wasted effort created by the Labor Theory of Value is staggering, grotesque. The theory, before it was a theory, worked OK in Adam Smith because it amounted to the observation, not theory, that labor is a key part of the value of commodities. The later history of this intuitive insight on both sides has been unnverving, close to proof that the current man-ape is too much of an IDIOT to handle either capitalism or socialism.
Why on earth do Marxists waste energy rehashing these issues? And why Marx? Why not the sources Marx cribbed from? Like the French socialists? They were innocent successors to the French Revolution who saw that market economics had stalled that democratic revolution with a new kind of exploitation and a new elite stealing the idea of freedom to legitimate markets unlimited. The solution was a true democracy, requiring some stance of limits on markets. The further issue of the abolition of property arose but was not necessarily crucial to the first stage of creating a true socialist liberalism. They are actually much more practical now because they demand we rethink the whole question and create a new synthesis. Marx is inspirational, but defending all his formulations is a recipe for failure, and springs from his strange way of generating a mystique of science. Eagleton says that Marx was right, but he made what seems a critical error in his critique of right: he subtly trashed the whole perspective of liberal freedoms, thereby confusing the whole subject, an outcome all too visible in the figure of Lenin who took Marx at his word and detested all the achievement of political rights created by the democratic revolution.
The mystique of Marx as science died in the thirties of the last century, but still survives among Marxists. I suspect these convinced believers have never read the dozens of scholarly tomes in libraries picking Marx apart, as to theory, and much else, but never as to the real indictment of capitalism and its ideology/theory, which doesn’t require Marx’s delusive theories. Defenders of Marx are not debating Sarah Palin, but figures like Kolakowski, the author of the non-trivial devastating Main Currents of Marxism, and many others. Kolakowsk was an ex-Marxist who lived through Polish bolshevism and was in no mood for Marx fans peddling uncritical bullshit, unchanged since the nineteenth century. He tried to finish Marx off forever, including his idiot defenders. He almost succeeded. These fans have usually never read a single such critique of Marx and think a few hortatory refutations of the cliche criticisms of Marx are enough.
We don’t need to bow completely to such critics (of which there are many writing at a high level of scholarship), but it is important to start over and reformulate the whole set of issues.
Thus to claim that ‘Marx was right’ is true/false/indeterminate, because the success of Marx and Engels was in the expose of market exploitation and its theory ideologies. They said many things, changed their minds, did something they didn’t talk about much (create a non-revolutionary labor movement) even as they talked revolution, and so on.
try reading:
Marx’s Fate: The Shape of a Life (Paperback) by Jerrold E. Seigel, a critique by a fan, who realized that Marx’s Capital, despite it symbolic brilliance, wasn’t really much of a book, but the mess left behind by fifteen years of writer’s block, and endless reasearch trying to delay the completion. It is a reminder that Marx’s masterpiece is mesmerizing, but not fully coherent. So what? It works fine as an ornament or piece of furniture.
The real issue, faced by the conservative social democrats who coopted socialism, is to create a practical socialism and/or a practical market socialism (social democracy) to expriment with social dynamics at the foothills of any putative ascent to communism. Karl Popper saw the point: theories aren’t going to work, practical navigating toward a goal (piecemeal social engineering) has to be the starting point. Historical Materialism as a theory isn’t relevant.
It is a sad question. The left is frozen, helpless and useless at a period when the market confusons current show that “Marx was right’ about many things. The things he got wrong has made those insights unusable.
In this combative, controversial book, Terry Eagleton takes issue with the prejudice that Marxism is dead and done with. Taking ten of the most common objections to Marxism—that it leads to political tyranny, that it reduces everything to the economic, that it is a form of historical determinism, and so on—he demonstrates in each case what a woeful travesty of Marx’s own thought these assumptions are. In a world in which capitalism has been shaken to its roots by some major crises, Why Marx Was Right is as urgent and timely as it is brave and candid. Written with Eagleton’s familiar wit, humor, and clarity, it will attract an audience far beyond the confines of academia.
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03.19.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 11:26 am by nemo
Ecological Endgames:
A Tyranny of Markets
The ideology of markets is an artificial construct attempting to make submission to capitalist exploitation seem like a natural necessity.
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Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 11:09 am by nemo
Adam Smith, far from being an apostle of free-market capitalism, advocated full employment, high wages, high taxes, and big government…
Das Capitalist
Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, Nicholas Phillipson, Yale, 346 pages
By George Scialabba
In the “Overture” to his grandly symphonic The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Peter Gay describes the “international type” of the philosophe as a “facile, articulate, doctrinaire, sociable, secular man of letters.” On this definition, was Adam Smith a philosophe?
Yes and no. Unlike his French counterparts and even his bosom friend David Hume, he led a retired life, much of it in the small Scottish town where he was born, and he lived with his mother until she died at a very advanced age. He was shy, destroyed most of his letters, and did not seem to relish giving brilliant performances, either in print or in conversation. He never fell afoul of civil or religious authority, had no mistresses, and engaged in no public quarrels.
(A semi-public one, though. Shortly after Hume’s death, Smith met Samuel Johnson at a party. Johnson spoke slightingly of Hume, Smith defended him, and their exchanges grew increasingly heated until Johnson exclaimed, “Sir, you lie!” To which Smith retorted, “Sir, you are the son of a whore!” and stalked out.)
On the other hand, Smith was modestly sociable—he had warm relationships with Turgot, Quesnay, and Condorcet. Like most of the philosophes, he was prolific and versatile, publishing much-admired essays on law, literature, and the history of science as well as his masterpieces on moral philosophy and political economy. And although he was not openly irreligious like Hume and Voltaire, he had as little use for the Calvinist superstitions of Scotland as his French contemporaries had for Roman Catholicism.
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03.04.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 12:15 pm by nemo
On The Threshold Of World Civilization
One of the pitfalls of globalization theory is the economic fundamentalism of its current proponents. But real globalization, visible in the eonic effect, transends economics.
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02.03.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 1:02 pm by nemo
http://darwiniana.com/2011/02/03/booknotes-marx/
The previous post is of considerable interest, but its basic barely stated point is that the ‘crisis’ has come and gone, Marx has stirred in his grave, and we are where we were before, powerless.
I think that Marx is too much on the minds of the left: they are bewitched still by a set of theories that are deeply cogent, but flawed, and also ‘tried and failed’.
The left is totally stuck on this man, who was not a very good theoretician. Capital transfixes people, but it analysis is mostly hortatory ideology in disguise.
It would help, if the left wishes to help, to start over.
One issue that seems relevant is the pointless focus on crisis: we can wait and wait for a terminal crisis, but that will probably never come. The issue is to start now with a challenge to capitalism based not on crisis thinking, but on its already demonstrated failures, and its logical problematic, independent of its hyped legacy.
The capitalist system exploits, and therefore should be transcended, effective immediately, without Lenininst take over hijackers wrecking the result.
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01.30.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 1:53 pm by nemo
Theory and Ideology: Das Adam Smith Problem
Economic ideology has run rampant in modern civilizaton creating a fictitious universe of exploitative capitalism. The whole mystique from Adam Smith can’t manage his skeptical stance, and his refusal to make economic systems the basis of a whole civilization.
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01.29.11
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy, Evolution at 2:42 pm by nemo
Harris has lost perspective on his subject, the moral landscape. But if we look at Darwinism and its treatment of the evolution of ethics we find a truly savage mathematical theory of altruism, whose main intent seems to be to destroy morality, especially the hated altruism that might interfere with capitalist economy.
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